It’s hard to know what beavers are thinking, but employees at a Manitoba conservation district may have found a way to fool beavers into thinking that their dam is not leaking.
Keith Wallcraft, manager of the La Salle Redboine Conservation District, said his staff has historically trapped problem beavers in south-central Manitoba. But last year they decided to take a different approach in the Rural Municipality of Victoria, which surrounds the community of Holland and stretches northward into Spruce Woods Provincial Park.
Beavers were damming up culverts under a municipal road on the east side of the park, causing repeated flooding. To stop the determined rodents, Wallcraft and others designed a small structure of four by four inch posts and heavy gauge 3/16 inch wire mesh between the posts. With the help of workers at the RM of Victoria, they installed the structures around two culverts along the road to keep the beavers away from the pipe.
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“There’s nothing to them,” Wallcraft said. “You can do (install) two in a day.”
The basic idea, said Ivan Bruneau, chief administrative officer for the RM of Victoria, is that beavers view culverts under the road as a hole in a dam. Being beavers, they feel the need to fill that hole. The structure convinces them the culvert is already dammed and diverts their attention from the pipe.
At a cost of $400 to build, beaver deceivers are much cheaper than cleaning out a culvert full of sticks and debris.
“What happens is then the bulk of the culvert gets plugged and when we’ve got spring runoff, it will actually run over the road,” Bruneau said. “Then we’re faced with having to lift this culvert out and clean it, or trying to blow it out with water.”
While the beaver deceivers have done their job, Wallcraft said they had to adapt the design, covering the top of the structure with wire mesh to prevent beavers from swimming over the walls and into the culvert when water levels are high.
So far only two culverts in the RM have beaver deceivers, Bruneau said, but more may be constructed, depending on the beavers.
“They could be in one spot one year and they could move down to another spot another year,” he said. “If you get a stubborn beaver who’s in there year after year, this kind of system really works great.”
